How David Stern ruined the NBA

Surely, I gest.

It’s hard to find a commissioner other than David Stern who oversaw his sport during a period of such exponential and popular growth.  Perhaps only the NFL’s Pete Rozelle presided over their sport during a time that demonstrated a comparable cultural boom.  We will see how time remembers Roger Goodell for under his watch, the NFL continues to grow in leaps and bounds.

David Stern’s rule as commissioner coincided, uncoincidentally, with the rise of the modern NBA.  His hand-picked and long-groomed successor Adam Silver has filled his shoes admirably and has their league on the verge of a record-setting television deal worth billions of dollars.

None of this could have happened, however, without Stern and the way he chose to promote the league.

First taking office in 1984, Stern came along at a time when the NBA featured extremely marketable athletes.  Stern recognized these assets and took full advantage.  Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas, Magic Johnson.  The game was changing before our very eyes, thanks in large part to the personalities within it, and their skill set unlike anything the game had ever seen.

Networks soon began promoting NBA games not as the Celtics versus the Lakers, which back then would be good enough reason to watch, but rather as Larry Bird’s Celtics versus Magic Johnson’s Lakers.  Their bold images hit our television screens.  Someone, somewhere along the line thought marketing the sport this way would be a better idea.

It worked.

While network ratings for Finals games are nowhere near what they were when Michael Jordan ruled the league, the NBA maintains this approach to marketing, focusing on the individual superstar rather than the team.

The ratings don’t lie.  More people watch NBA games when LeBron James is playing against Steph Curry, people we know, than when two teams are playing without a sellable superstar.  While Luca Doncic is one of those, he’s only 25 and many don’t know him yet.  On the other hand, the Boston Celtics, your current NBA champions, are an amalgam.  Their one superstar who the media desperately wants to boost into superstar status, Jayson Tatum, wasn’t even the Celtic’s best player.  Or maybe he was.  His counterpart, Jaylen Brown, won Finals MVP, and was more consistent statistically.  Was he better?  You tell me.  Therein lies the rub.

It’s not the first time in history that the second (or even third or fourth) best player on his team won Finals MVP but this award traditionally goes to the winning team’s (and perhaps the league’s) best player.  That was what was so different about these NBA Finals and so right about these Boston Celtics.  They were a team with no clearcut singular force, which went against the league’s traditional marketing scheme.

Up until the last Finals game was played, you could still place a wager on who you thought would win Finals MVP.  Through four games, Brown was the odds-on favorite but that doesn’t change the fact that others could have wrestled that honor away from him.  Tatum almost did, having a spectacular Game Five.

In the wake of this individualized marketing ploy, we began using terms like “alpha” and “Batman/Robin” to simplify a player’s place in the roster hierarchy when they didn’t always apply, especially in Boston’s case.  This current composition is so unfamiliar to us that we scratch our heads and wonder what happened.  The league has promoted its individual superstars so prominently and for so long that we were brainwashed to believe the Celtics might not be as great as they were.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see how the Celtics mowed through the Dallas Mavericks in these Finals, which they did, don’t fool yourself.  Headed into the Finals, they were only -220 favorites – they should have been more – which was only swayed in Dallas’ favor because of how the Mavs handled the Minnesota Timberwolves in the Western Conference Finals.  Not only were Luca Doncic and Kyrie Irving both playing spectacular basketball, but reactionary pundits were calling them “the best scoring backcourt” in NBA history.  This was all fodder for suckers, as it swayed gambling lines, and our opinions, substantially.  Recency bias is one hell of a drug, as is our proclivity for falling in love with the marketable star.

Because the Celtics didn’t have that “guy” (we blame Jayson Tatum for this), because they ran through an Eastern Conference fraught with injury, we questioned their path to greatness.  The joke was on us as this team was carefully constructed from top to bottom.  The Celtics featured versatility and depth that few other teams in the league boasted.  The networks’ inability to figure out whether to call them “Jayson Tatum’s Celtics” or “Jaylen Brown’s Celtics” didn’t make them any less of a champion.  On the contrary, it made them more of one.

We tend to forget that basketball is not a one-on-one sport, despite how many teams in the league play that way.  In the end, the isolation basketball of the Dallas Mavericks was no match for a Celtics team that out-assisted them in four of the five games played.  The only game Dallas won was the game in which they had more team assists than Boston.  How’s that for coincidence?

With little exception, you can review the last batch of NBA champions and identify them as Jokic’s Nuggets, Curry’s Warriors, Giannis’ Bucks or LeBron’s Lakers, one player clearly better than the rest of his teammates.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  It’s the way the league has chosen to market its product.  But in 2024, more than any other year in recent memory, the Celtics reminded us that team play wins championships.

While 29 other teams now react and scramble trying to beat the C’s, here’s hoping the league figures out how to properly market them.

Please follow and like us: